Long before Seinfeld came along with the show about nothing there were modernist writers writing novels about nothing. The plotless novel, bereft of much in the way of story, depends instead on a focus on daily life and psychological states, and a demanding experimentalist mode of writing sure to trip up less talented authors. Thankfully Henry Green was not one of these, as evidenced by the application of that trite phrase “a writer’s writer” one can find applied to him in various articles and essays.

Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.

Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.

So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:

Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:

Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.

Good Lord that’s good. ( )

Where did I hear about this one? https://travellinpenguin.wordpress.com/2021/06/13/simply-sunday-16/

This was another novel of Green's that I could not get into. I found the setting, characters, themes, writing, and effect to be sorely lacking and generally placid and uninteresting. I was not hooked and reading this felt more like a chore than anything else. Overall, I was not impressed and do not recommend this novel.

Barely 2 stars, yet again. ( )

A fantastic novel! As with other modernist masterpieces such as "Ulysses" and "Under the Volcano", "To the Lighthouse" and "Gravity's Rainbow", you have to submit to the style until you are moving in its rhythm - but that is in fact the essence of modernism, which is why so many of the great works in the tradition gather negative reviews at Internet sites (and probably would have a hard time getting published today). Don't let the naysayers dissuade you. Henry Green is a master and this is one of his greatest achievements. ( )

Take a book that the Guardian rated #63 of the 100 best English novels; add ecstatic praise from John Updike, and you would expect a first rate read. In the case of Party Going by Henry Green, not so much.

A group of bright, young, and spoiled English men and women are on their way to a house party in the South of France by train when a thick fog rolls in from the Channel. All trains are delayed, apparently indefinitely. Their host, Max, arranges for them to wait in a railway-owned hotel immediately across from the station. The station itself begins to get exceedingly crowded as suburban Londoners seek to go home, but no trains depart. One of the girls says, “It’s terrifying. I didn’t know there were so many people in the world.” Certainly not in the world of the rich party-goers, who are protected from the growing masses as the hotel locks its doors, leaving the party-goers’ luggage and porters in the station.

The party-goers are a spoiled lot with hardly an attractive character among them. For example the aunt of one of the girls (Claire) had come to the station to wish her off, but she (the aunt) has the indecency to become ill, thus jeopardizing Claire’s prospect of a good time. Claire says:

“It’s rather touching that’s why she came to see us off really it’s her only link. No, but it’s not touching actually because she goes and gets ill. Oh, Evelyn, it’s so unfair, isn’t it?”

Their stay at the hotel is comfortable, but boring, for the reader as well as for the party goers. The book is only 144 pages long, but the first 100 pages seem like 500. The thick London fog mirrors the impenetrability of the writing in the beginning. It is hard to tell one character from another. In addition, the author has the annoying habit of referring to three of the female characters either as by her first name or by “Miss [last name], ” but almost never by both names so that the reader can get a feel for who is who.

The final third of the book gets a bit more interesting as Max has to juggle two different girlfriends (one of whom was not actually invited). Max and the two girlfriends are effectively individuated. Some of the other characters are so similar that the author could have substituted one for another in numerous places and not affected the flow of the action. I had to read this book as part of a Symposium I will be attending. At first, I was ready to toss the book and rely on the Cliff Notes, but the book started to grow on me. I even began to appreciate the writer’s skill, which is considerable. Nonetheless, I hardly think it deserves to be called great, let alone one of the top 100 English novels.

(JAB) ( )